If you sail into sleep on the unrollicked boat,
my happenstance should wish your strangles
slight over mudworms and sadly written love notes.
Tonight, that I am squeezed as by tourniquet,
is my plaintive upwake, night like the Tigris’ floor,
black and full of tightly held bones.
This cuff cuts to the tingles, squeezing. This no sleep.
It is so snugly fastened, my mode,
I note my chance of sleep cuts its ray behind the cloud.
If you wonder where I go while you mumble, sheeted,
I am taken by a little mongoose into an ugly hole.
He growls up his gut and spits at the world,
how I must notch a snake’s hood before I sever
the underneck, how I am awake for a reason.
You whose outer birds fly day,
if you can not see me in this shitty fen,
if you later in sun-hairs scratch me from the eye,
disorder is the scratch of my thoughts at your night,
as you sleep squeaking of peace.
You wake just after I fall, I and my little mongoose,
shunted down the box of closed eyes.
Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, Small Spiral Notebook, and Rock Salt Plum, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. He tries hard.
© 2007, Ray Succre
Halfway Down the Stairs 